Art, Psychiatry, and Religion

So, I'm beating my ass into a thin gruel getting a couple of thousand words a day written. It's all shit at the moment, of course. But not a biggie. I was considering whether it's art, or ever going to be. So I started doing a little research to figure out when or if it is elevated from page-scrawled crap into the "art" sphere, and I ran across this quote. It's from "Dhalgren," an 800 or 900 page monstrosity I've mentioned before as one of the most aggravating, self-indulgent pieces of high-concept bullshit that I've ever read. I've also mentioned it as some of the best writing I know.

Anyhow, this popped up during my search, and, given my current annoyance at my "art," sounds as true as anything I've read about it.

“But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren 

On a completely unrelated note, given who I am, does it strike anyone else as odd that one of my favorite authors is a borderline (or more) psychotic, hallucinating, profoundly dyslexic, dysmetric, gay, African American man who was raised in Harlem?

Naw, I didn't think so either.

FYI: Up over 4400 words, so far...